Further Changes From Play Testing

A few more changes from my first play testing session.

Marketing equals

The amount of marketing resources you put into a product will now equal the number of turns it generates profits. This prevents players becoming so much ‘victims of history’ and becoming burdened with unsuccessful products. This now allows players to have more strategy and make their favourite products from history a success.

Refining Staff

Continuing from the last changes to staff in Chip Shop, they have been refined further. Firstly I have split staff into two sub-concepts. Generic staff resources now effect how many resources you can have allocated into marketing and R&D departments and they are absorbed when ‘upgraded’ to a specialist staff card. When these specialist staff members become too costly to maintain, players now have the chance to fire them through one of the new ‘income stream’ options. Doing so frees the player from ongoing commitments, but the specialist is immediately made available to other players to hire.

Manual Tweaks

Based on many of these changes it was time to update the manual. This included explicitly mentioning what happens to a product when it is no longer active, re-organizing the resources sections and removing existing examples for now.